To the history of community attitudes to suicides

Up to the 19th century the “damned challenge”, namely suicide, would come up for discussion in the overlapping fields of religion and morality, law and philosophy as well as art (the opinions being polarized from justifying to condemning); next, due to emerging of positivism, suicide got tackled by joint efforts of special sciences. Philosophers, artists, psychologists interpreted this phenomenon through clinical study of the urgent existential issues: spirit and matter, subject and object, human and divine, person and community, part and whole. For ages, the suicide microcosm kept becoming increasingly meaningful in the spheres of philosophy (suicide as an goodness and individual right), theology (suicide as a sin) and art (suicide as a tragic and sacral event), psychiatry (suicide as a symptom) and psychology, sociology, law (criminalizing and decriminalizing of suicide) by solving the following problems: freedom of will and death, triumph of the soul and body, connection between a person and God, individual and society. With the historical-philosophical (axiological) approach, the attitude to suicide ranging from fear and rejection to tolerance and empathy evolved, according to the degree of admitting the occurrence of self-inflicted destruction. At present, a suicide victim rather provokes compassion (due to one’s unbearable tedium vitae) than horror and public condemnation (because of one’s deviating behavior)